Anyway, with that as a beginning, I've been meaning to tell you all about some of the challenges we faced with our most recent crop of chickens (acquired March 23rd, harvested last week, this coming Monday (June 6th), and again in another 10 days or so... you'll see what I mean if you keep reading).
The first wrinkle began before we even ordered our chicks. The hatchery we ordered from last year had gone out of business, so Milan made more than a couple dozen phone calls to various hatcheries and resellers trying to get a batch of 100 White Cornish X chicks. Of course, we could always order from Murray McMurray, right? Yes, but one of our values is "local", and although the term is now almost as over-used and diluted as "free-range", to us, Iowa ain't local. I know they are a great hatchery in many respects, but it's hard for us to think of 100 little chickens traveling 2,000 miles without food or water. Call us softies, if you like. That left us with few options for getting 100 chicks at once, so we settled on getting them through our local Grange Coop (still, their chicks come from some hatchery in Texas -- not so local, either).
When our order arrived, we drove to Grants Pass to pick up 100 White Cornish X and 12 Red Cornish X (see"A Little Experiment: Part 1" and "A Little Experiment: Part 2"). At that point, it was clear that there were multiple ages of chickens in the box. Some were a good five-to-six days old, as they had lost their fluff and had their wing feathers in. Others were clearly only day-old chicks (as was the case with all 12 Red Cornish X birds).
The challenge of multiple ages is one that plagues the batch throughout its entire cycle. Plainly, older chickens are bigger and shove out the smaller ones to the point where the big just keep getting bigger and bigger and the small ones stay small because they can't bully their way past the bullies. This applies to both food and heat. We lost a couple of the smallest chickens early on to being crushed by their peers as they sought heat underneath the hover. Again, this was probably a result of multiple inputs: cold nights, not eating enough to get strong, not drinking enough to be well hydrated, etc., but then to be bullied out to the edge of the heat, well, that ends it. Chicks, and particularly the White Cornish birds, are anything but robust. Miss one element of their needs and it's curtains for them. They essentially give up, which comports with their manifested lazy nature as adults. It was such a striking contrast to me to watch the little Canada Goose gosling bounce back from his ordeal (see my post titled "One Little Gosling's Undesired Adventure"). A White Cornish X chicken would never have fought that hard to survive, and even if it would have fought to survive, would have probably crawled into a bush and died of exhaustion after being released.
As time passes, the big continue to get bigger, so they need to be harvested sooner. We harvest our White Cornish birds at 9 weeks. This time around, it meant we had to have two harvest days -- one last Sunday, May 30th, and one coming up June 6th. Actually, we'll even have a third harvest day to process the Red Cornish X birds, which don't grow as quickly and don't convert feed as well. Having them this go-round was an experiment on our part, and it's clear they cannot be raised with the Whites, which have to be ration-fed to even live to nine weeks of age (commercial facilities process their birds at 6 weeks of age because that's about when they start dying anyway, as their skeletal structure and organs begin to fail due to their incredible weight -- think of them as 200-lb human two-year-olds). The Reds, on the other hand, at 9 weeks of age and ration feeding, feel like the classic "rubber chicken" when you pick them up: the breast-bone protrudes way out and they feel like nothing but feathers. They need to be free-fed and grown to 10-12 weeks of age.
Setting up these harvest days is no small matter, so having to do three of them for one batch of 100 birds is deflating. We harvested the 50 oldest birds last Sunday, will do another 28 on Monday, and the remaining 10 Red Cornish birds... well, we're not even sure yet when we'll do those. Maybe in another 10 days or so, like I speculated in the beginning of this post.
The next and more depressing challenge we experienced with this batch of chickens was something we didn't even consider before we were faced with it. As I said, the first wrinkle was not being able to get our chicks from the same hatchery we patronized last year (Lazy 54 Hatchery in Hubbard, Oregon). Apparently, they had great chicks, because we never had a one with any obvious genetic issues. Well, that changed this time around. The genetics on this batch of White Cornish X was bad. We started to notice it around 4 and 5 weeks of age: more and more birds were turning up with legs turned out at crazy angles or crumpled feet. A few died for no discernible reason, so we suspect there were internal manifestations of their poor genetics to blame. Milan watched a few weaken and would always put them in the sick bay and give them special attention for a few days. Only two such chickens rallied; the others went down hill to the point that Milan put them out of their misery (did someone say farm life is "romantic"?!). In the end, we had over 20% loss for this batch, which is a horribly high number. Industry average is 10%, and we had less than 5% all last year!
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| White Cornish X with deformed feet. |
Here's an example of the crumpled feet, and this isn't even such a bad one. The bad ones didn't make it past 6-7 weeks; this one is 9 weeks old (photo taken the day before harvest).
Suffice it to say, it's been a tough road this Spring. Even though we realize some things were out of our control, we feel responsible for the birds we lost, not to mention that it's hard to tell our customers we can't fill their orders this time around. We usually have 5-6 birds as back up, but we've long blown through those and are telling folks that ordered 5 to expect 2. Not a message I like to deliver.
As a result of all this, we will probably move away entirely from raising the White Cornish X breed. We were optimistic after raising them last year. Some of last year's got as old as 12 weeks and were still up, pecking and scratching, hale and hardy, with all their feathers intact on their breasts (they're often featherless there because their breasts get so heavy they can't stand up, so their feathers fall out and don't grow back and as a result, the breast skin gets really dirty), but we must have just been lucky to get 200 really healthy ones. This year was just a whole different story, and reminded us that the White Cornish X is a bird that's been highly bred and re-bred specifically for the Foster Farms situation: sitting in a cage in front of a feed trough (that's never empty) for 6 weeks of life. Here's a good visual of how chickens have changed to meet the Foster Farms standard in the last 50+ years (courtesy of Nature's Harmony Farm in Elberton, Georgia):
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| White Cornish X at 68 days old in 1950, vs. 47 days old in 2008. |
So, expect to hear more about Red Cornish X birds in the future, and maybe even Freedom Rangers at Sojourn Farms. To all our loyal customers, thanks for sticking with us through our learning process. We really are trying very hard to raise healthy, happy, free-range, organic, pastured chickens. It's not always easy and definitely not glamorous, but hearing how much you appreciate our efforts means a lot to us.
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